When in Rome, plan to go home

Sebastian Cresswell-Turner

"How lucky you are to be living in Italy." "That must be heaven." "I do envy you." If you live in Rome, as I do, you get used to comments like these. But you soon realise that the idyllic vision of Italy suffers from just one drawback: it is almost complete rubbish.

For the first few months after you move here, all is indeed perfect. The sun is warm, the people are welcoming, the language is a joy, the food is delicious, the wine is cheap, and everyone is a pleasure to look at. You congratulate yourself on your wisdom and you pity your friends who are still locked up in their grey, northern offices.

But then you begin to realise that in this new paradise you face a major problem: it is virtually impossible to earn a living. Take Rome. To live here with a minimum of dignity (renting a small flat, eating out occasionally, but no car and no proper holidays), you need a good 3,000 euros a month pre-tax, say 1,800 euros post-tax (roughly £2,100 and £1,250 respectively). However modest this seems, it is not what you will get. While in the Anglo-Saxon world most adults expect to be able to live independently off their salaries, in Italy most don't. They stay with their families. Indeed, a staggering 70 per cent of single Italian men between the ages of 25 and 29 live in subsidised comfort at home, where their meagre earnings do very nicely as pocket money. And when they do move out to the stability of marriage or cohabitation, it is generally into a flat that is provided by the family.

So any foreigner here faces a hard struggle. Most of the English-speaking expatriates are English tutors who live in foul, rented rooms and earn the same hourly wage as cleaning women, but without the regular employment the latter enjoy.

I have come across quite a few of them: bums, drifters, drunks and dropouts; sad specimens, bitterly aware, between one hangover and another, that they have made a shameful mess of their lives. If they fail to find a mate with whom to pool resources, the future they face is unthinkably grim. Most of them give up and go back home. Or they sink without a trace.

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Not surprisingly, all this takes its toll and, after a while, you begin to appreciate the true cost of the many undoubted joys of living in Italy. You realise, for example, that the flip-side of the cheerful noise and chaos is the mind-boggling complication of life here, the Italian inability - no, refusal - to organise anything or to think ahead.

Thus, paying a utilities bill or collecting a registered letter is a major operation, while registering a rental contract, which you have to do to make it valid, is a hallucination-inducing bureaucratic odyssey (in my case, four mornings of queueing, elbowing, grovelling, begging and pleading on the other side of the city).

Likewise, trying to organise a social event in Rome is simply a waste of time. No matter what inducements you offer, your Italian friends will not commit themselves. Basically, what happens, happens, and you're best off not worrying about it. There's a sunny expression that sums this up: Chi c'e, c'e; chi non c'e, non c'e - if they come, they come; if they don't, they don't.

What is a nuisance socially, though, is a major problem professionally. I routinely get asked to drop everything and do a fortnight's work in one week; and I was recently contacted at six o'clock one evening by Rome's newest exhibition centre to translate a long and complex text on Dante's Divine Comedy by 10am the next day (16 hours' notice to do 14 hours' work, it turned out).

Nor can you say no to these requests, because, if you do, you will lose most of your clients. The best policy is to shrug your shoulders and smile. But there are moments when you cannot help fuming at the amateurishness of this way of working; moments in which you suspect that when the Italians boast of their ability to improvise brilliant solutions, what they really mean is that they prefer the quick-fix to getting their act together.

After a while, then, you are haunted by a vague sense of the absurd, which is only exacerbated by opening a newspaper or switching on the television. What is quite clear from the interminable chat shows in which politicians talk with great fluency and urgency about what the government should do, is that, in Italy, the government either cannot or will not govern. The looming pensions crisis, the huge problem of illegal immigration, the hopelessly clogged-up judicial system - not one of these issues receives serious or consistent attention. Giulio Andreotti, seven times Italy's prime minister, summed up the Italian approach when he said, to general approval, that most problems went away if you waited long enough.

Regardless of its membership of the EU and of a constitution which in theory safeguards every imaginable right, in practice, Italy is a land of almost unbridled anarchy. Although you are strangled by red tape and persecuted by a million arbitrarily imposed petty regulations, the rule of law does not exist. It is quite common for the simplest legal cases to take five or 10 years to complete. And if - God forbid - you come up against the dark side of Italy, you realise that the only real protection here is not the law, but wealth or family. Without these, you are lost.

Then, of course, there's the Mafia. Read any of the many authoritative books on the subject and you are horrified at what amounts to the outright refusal of the state to deal with the problem. Sure, there is the occasional burst of legislation when the situation becomes too embarrassing; but on the whole, too little too late, and with absolutely no sense of sustained commitment. While the efforts of individuals involved in the fight against organised crime are often heroic, the weakness of the state defies belief.

In other words, Italy is, in many ways, a banana republic. That is why, until recently - until they realised what a forlorn hope it was - the Italians were so mightily keen on the EU: they were praying that Brussels would save them from themselves. As a British ambassador once said to me: "Italy? No one takes it seriously. The place is a joke."

How, then, do you come to terms with it? The answer is that unless you wish to go round in a lather of impotent fury (and it must be said that this is what many foreigners do), you are best advised to shrug your shoulders and turn to the immediate pleasures of life for consolation.

The Italians, you realise after a while, believe in just three things: beauty and health; family and security; and football. In the final analysis, the Italians simply cannot be bothered with the enormous problems that beset their beautiful country. They are bored by them. They don't want to know.

When, after you have been here for a few years, you switch on the television and see the absurdly up-beat chat-show presenter whipping his suntanned audience into a frenzy of fabricated hilarity, then you know that what you are witnessing is a frantic determination not to look facts in the face, and it occurs to you that not only Italy's pampered youth but also the whole country is suffering from a chronic case of the Peter Pan syndrome, of the refusal to grow up.

And when you realise this, you have put your finger on what has been bothering you for the past few years: the suspicion that all the noise and all the grand promises and all the superficial allure of the show are merely a flimsy veneer covering the sadness and futility that lie at the core of Italian life. This is what the greatest Italian writers and film-makers have sensed; this is the theme that Fellini constantly returns to (La Dolce Vita is an ironic title); and this is the conclusion that Luigi Barzini came to 40 years ago at the end of The Italians, his classic portrait of the nation:

"The Italian way of life cannot be considered a success except by temporary visitors. It solves no problems. It makes them worse. It would be a success of sorts if at least it made Italians happy. It does not. Its effects are costly, flimsy and short-range. The people enjoy its temporary advantages, to be sure, without which they could not endure life, but are constantly tormented by discontent The unsolved problems pile up and inevitably produce catastrophes at regular intervals. The Italians always see the next one approaching with a clear eye but cannot do anything to ward it off. They can only play their amusing games and delude themselves for a while."

Unfortunately for Italy and her charming, warm-hearted, intelligent and energetic inhabitants, this is as true today as it was more than a generation ago.